


Degrees of Separation

by hyrude



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: F/F, Genderswap, Love Confessions, Repression, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 05:58:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17238698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyrude/pseuds/hyrude
Summary: After graduation, Hajime and Tooru revisit their favorite childhood camping spot. Everything and nothing has changed.Written for@loveintheveinsfor the@haikyuusecretsantaexchange! The prompt I went with was “snow + confession.” I hope you enjoy!





	Degrees of Separation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loveintheveins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveintheveins/gifts).



The watering hole they used to fish at is shimmering under a foot of frosted glass.

The instant the car was parked – before they’d unlocked the cottage door or unloaded the luggage Hajime had painstakingly Tetrised into the cramped trunk that morning – Tooru was killing the ignition and booking it to the bank in huge, graceless leaps to keep the foot of snow from creeping into her boots. The door to the driver’s side still hangs open, and the freezing cold air blowing in forces Hajime from her seat too.

She takes her time following, stepping only where Tooru’s left deep footprints in the snowfall. An outsider would see only one set of tracks, save for the detour Hajime took to kick both doors closed again.

It’s hard to say whose idea it was, visiting again. Hajime was the one to pitch a return to the Mt. Zao campsite they spent every summer at until it closed down midway through junior high, but Tooru was the one to find the very same rickety little cottage listed on Airbnb three weeks before winter graduation. Plans fell into place.

As many years as Hajime’s known the mountain, from the lakes to the wells to every hiking trail she’d pushed Tooru down, she’s never visited when cicadas weren’t crying and the gravel wouldn’t burn your bare feet. Had she not navigated the road trip, she wonders if she’d recognize it at all, with the heavy blanket of snow softening the jut of rocks and bending the trees into foreign shapes. It’s like looking at an alien landscape.

The rules seem different here. Time moves slower. The snow falls lazily and updrafts keep kicking it back up in dense flurries, so it just hangs suspended in the air like it doesn’t care if it ever reaches the ground.

And the center of it, Tooru’s prodding the toe of one boot on the surface of the frozen lake, leaning forward again and again but always chickening out before testing her full weight.

Well, one thing hasn’t changed.

“I’m not fishing you out if you fall in.” They’re not that far apart, but Hajime still feels the need to shout so her voice isn’t carried away by the wind.

“I wouldn’t expect you to! The biggest thing you’ve ever reeled in is a tadpole,” Tooru calls back. It takes some of the bite out, how she has to work to get the words out between chattering teeth. She steps away from the edge, though, in favor of hopping onto the white mass vaguely in the shape of the wooden dock. Snow flicks everywhere when she lands, like a delayed splash from a puddle.

Hajime catches up at last and gets a leg up in time to help Tooru punt snow clumps off the wood panels until they have a mostly-dry place to sit. Tooru lets her legs and the tassled end of her loose scarf dangle off the edge, but she looks under her edge of the dock at something out of Hajime’s line of vision and before either of them are settled, she’s dropping over the side feet first.

There’s the dull sound of powder shifting, and then a triumphant crow of “ha!” before Tooru’s head peeks back over the side of the dock, followed by a thin stick clenched in her frozen fist.

Hajime scrambles over to grab it so Tooru has both hands free to haul herself back up. “Is this-?”

“Our fishing rod!” Tooru declares, snatching it back as soon as she’s righted herself again. She picks at the ice that’s formed around the handle and then sets about testing the reel. It makes the first revolution with difficulty, but once she’s forced through the kinks, it turns like new.

“There’s no way that’s ours,” Hajime huffs.

“It is, look!” Tooru tilts it so she can point out an engraving on the opposite side. An H and a T, barely discernible in the space where hard plastic turns to dark wood. “I stashed it the last summer we were here, after we found out the camp was shutting down.”

Hajime takes the rod in her hands, runs her thumb over the carved letters. She still has the pocketknife Tooru’d lent her to do it all those years ago. “Why?”

Tooru looks at her face and then back down at their initials, wrinkling her nose. “Why do kids do anything?”

She tries and fails to remember their reasoning for carving their initials in the first place. Maybe it was practice in case they ever worked up the courage to cut into an actual tree.

They’d flitted between hobbies so quickly as kids, their parents stopped investing in two of every tool and toy and instead forced them to share. Hajime doesn’t recall minding, though. They’d worked together, Tooru reeling while Hajime steadied the handle and pulled, and they’d worked together to pry the hook from the fish’s mouth and throw it back, too.

Hajime holds the rod fully in her left hand and turns the reel herself, watching the tiny gears whir and coax the spool to whirl where the line would be. It fits in her hand differently now, but it’s grounding to feel at least one thing familiar. It breaks Mt. Zao’s spell, just a little bit.

She wonders if it fits differently in Tooru’s hand, too. She wonders if their hands fit differently in each other’s.

“I think I was scared of forgetting this place, or,” Tooru continues after a moment, choosing her words carefully, “or that this place would forget us. I don’t know.” She nudges Hajime’s hand off the reel handle so she can turn it while Hajime holds it, just like old times. “I remember thinking that this place would close down, and people would stop coming, and everything would fall apart. So one day, when archaeologists discovered the ruins, they’d find this with our initials and know it belonged to us.”

Hajime sets the fishing rod down between them. “That’s stupid.”

“Stupid! I was 11! What’s stupid is you insisting you spend half an hour etching our initials in the handle!” Tooru maintains, indignant and jabbing Hajime hard in the meat of her arm. “We were the only ones who ever used it, it’s not like anyone was gonna rob us. It’s practically – practically Fisher-Price!”

Halfway through, Tooru starts laughing at herself, and Hajime can’t help laughing along. “Maybe I wasn’t signing it! Maybe if you hadn’t nagged so much, I would’ve had time to draw the heart around it,” she jokes, and it’s only after she’s already said it that she realizes how it sounds. She braces herself to for a good minute of ridicule.

Tooru only raises her eyebrows and hums out a different kind of laugh, though, and then she turns to gaze out over the frozen lake like she expects to see a boat returning on the horizon.

Maybe there is something to be looking at, but Hajime wouldn’t know. She’s too busy watching the flurries that catch in Tooru’s long lashes, how they shake free every time she shivers.

“That giant suitcase, and you didn’t have space for a real coat?” Hajime teases to fill the silence.

“Or gloves!” Tooru agrees immediately, snapping back to face Hajime and wiggling her fingers between their faces. They’ve already turned a dark pink to match her wind-chapped cheeks. “I got frostbite the second I left the car. Feel!”

Before Hajime can cringe away, she’s pressing them into the warm crook of her neck. “Shit! I believed you already!” Hajime laughs desperately, flushing at how ticklish it is against her pulse. She clasps Tooru’s bare hands in her gloved ones before she can prod any further under her collar and they both still.

“Is that better?” Hajime asks.

“That’s better,” Tooru says.

There’s a long moment where they’re just looking at each other before Hajime forces her attention back to the frozen watering hole.

The lake is a mirror, this close, but the warping of the ice makes their reflections just a little bit off. If she didn’t know Tooru’s appearance even better than her own, she probably wouldn’t have noticed, but it’s just distinct enough that she can imagine they’re two different people.

The girls in the lake sit with their joined hands between them. The one who looks almost just like Tooru is still staring at the one who looks almost just like Hajime.

“Here, you should share my coat, at least. It’s big enough for both of us,” not-Hajime offers to not-Tooru, and she sees herself part their hands so she can shrug it off her inner shoulder. Tooru shuffles closer until she’s flush to her side, then loops her arm through the empty sleeve. Inside the coat, Tooru slips her other arm behind Hajime’s waist to hold her weight as she leans.

It’s uncomfortable sitting arm-to-arm, and Tooru’s shoulder is at the perfect height for Iwaizumi to lay her head on, so she shifts just enough to get comfortable.

It almost startles her when Tooru speaks again. “I did remember gloves.”

Tooru’s reflection is studying her. She looks uncharacteristically shy, and it’s not just the distortion. The hand hidden inside her coat that was braced against the dock creeps closer to Hajime’s waist, and then she feels icy fingers brush against the inch of skin between her pants and her rucked up shirt.

Oh.

“Now we’re even on confessions, then.”

And Hajime watches not-Tooru far hand come up to her cheek, feels the caress an instant later. Hajime looks for hesitation on their doppelgangers’ faces, but she sees only longing, and their reflections touch first noses then lips, and it takes a moment before Hajime realizes she’s being kissed as well.

She closes her eyes and takes Tooru’s face in her hands to kiss her back, and she doesn’t know what their reflections do after that.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m so sorry this is so late! I had big plans for a complicated multichapter roadtrip fic, but it just didn’t come together in time and I didn’t want to give you something incomplete. I hope you still enjoyed! 
> 
> I feel like iwaoi has a lot of potential for “intricate rituals,” so I had fun toying with what excuses they might come up with to justify their obvious feelings for each other. 
> 
> Some notes: 
> 
> Fishing symbolizes personal growth and self discovery. A fishing rod symbolizes a lover or spouse. 
> 
> Mt. Zao is the only famous mountain in Miyagi! It gets so cold and so windy that icicles will form on trees completely sideways, which is a very cool fact I read only after writing this entire fic and being too sleepy to add it in. 
> 
> I had to consciously remove numerous descriptions of Oikawa being hot just because I personally think lesbian Oikawa would be really hot.


End file.
